Simple Is not Simplistic

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"Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most." Clement Mok.

"Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple." Edward de Bono.

First of all a couple of definitions (from the "New Oxford Dictionary Of English"):

simple easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty

simplistic treating complex issues and problems as if they were much simpler than they really are

I'm pretty sure that most developers know that simple software is more maintainable, has fewer bugs, has a longer lifetime, etc., and that they always try to implement the simplest solutions they can possibly think of. I know also that many of those developers often end-up with unmaintainable code very quickly.

In other terms, simplistic solutions leave some important parts of the original problem unsolved. In the world of software development two typical victims of this approach (but by no means the only ones) are the users, who end up with buggy systems, and the maintainability of the code base, which gradually worsens.